Posts from the ‘Civic Engagement in Action Series’ Category

By Jaron Castranio, Senior Political Science major, California University of Pennsylvania

Alan Abramowitz, one of the country’s leading elections forecasters, recently returned to California University of Pennsylvania to discuss “Will the Democrats Catch a Wave? The Outlook for the 2018 Midterm Elections.” His presentation focused on whether Democrats would be able to regain control of the House.

Abramowitz pointed to election surges and declines, reminding everyone that it is not unusual for the president’s party to lose seats in midterm elections. His predictions for the upcoming election were based on the premise that there are more seats for Republicans to lose than there are for Democrats; however, he mentioned that the number of turnovers also depends on the president’s approval rating. Trump’s low numbers may cause a greater than usual shift in power. According to Abramowitz, there is better than a 50 percent chance that Democrats will win back the House.

Like this:

The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts University was featured in an article in the front section of the Sunday New York Times, “How College Campuses Are Trying to Tap Students’ Voting Power.” The article highlights their groundbreaking research and work on campuses, along with the work of many of their partner organizations, campuses, and educators. It reflects a growing realization in higher education that for too long, political learning and engagement has been episodic and relegated to a small subset of programs and students. NSLVE is a wake-up call. We hope that campuses will share this article, use their reports, assess their campus climates for political learning and engagement, treat elections as teachable moments, and work to cultivate a positive climate for political learning, discourse, equity, and participation – Politics 365!

Like this:

By David Hoffman, Jennifer Domagal-Goldman, Stephanie King, and Verdis Robinson

This is the fourth in a series of posts addressing the emergent Theory of Change being developed by higher education institutions that participate in the annual Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Meeting network, which includes a network of colleges and universities affiliated with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ (AASCU) American Democracy Project, The Democracy Commitment, and NASPA LEAD Initiative.

The first post described the CLDE Emergent Theory of Change and the process by which it is being developed; the second post identified key features of the thriving democracy higher education’s CLDE work seeks to support; and the third post proposed a set of learning outcomes to which this work should be directed.

In previous posts on the emergent Theory of Change, we sketched a vision of a thriving democracy in which people would work together to nurture and express values such as courage, honesty, wisdom, and stewardship, not just as voters on Election Day or in episodic service projects, but in every relationship and institution. We asserted that preparing students to create and contribute to that thriving democracy would involve cultivating knowledge, skills, and dispositions not always nurtured by our current approaches to civic learning and democratic engagement. We proposed that such knowledge, skills, and dispositions would include civic literacy and discernment, civic agency, real communication, critical solidarity, civic courage, integrity, and congruence.

Responding to the pedagogy prompt — How can we best foster the acquisition and development of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for a thriving democracy? Photo credit: David Hoffman.

In this post, we ask: What approaches to teaching and learning can succeed in achieving these profoundly ambitious learning outcomes? In particular, we must grapple with the question of how to educate in ways that do not subtly reproduce the dehumanizing, disempowering aspects of our broader culture. Within the academy, these cultural conventions can take the form of boundaries, hierarchies, and protocols that isolate faculty and staff members and reduce them to content transmitters and service providers. Those same conventions can undermine students’ agency and sense of connection to each other and to their communities.

For inspiration, we can look at spaces in which students have developed approaches to cultivating their own responsible, hopeful, and empowering civic mindsets.

As an example, at the conclusion of each University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) Student Government Association (SGA) meeting, the chair initiates a time-honored ritual of reflection called “Passing the Gavel.” It begins with the chair passing the wooden gavel they’ve used during the meeting to the left or right. The person receiving the gavel offers thoughts about the process of the meeting: Did participants have productive discussions, or did they get bogged down in minutia and distracted by petty squabbles? What behaviors were helpful and should be reinforced at future meetings? What changes in facilitation or communication strategies would produce greater inclusion, productivity, and collective wisdom? The gavel travels from person to person around the room, with each participant offering perspectives. When a meeting has been particularly awkward or contentious, these post-adjournment reflections can take up to an hour.

Passing the Gavel encourages participants to take responsibility for the performance and health of the group. It encourages the silent to speak, and the talkative to listen. The ritual also embeds and enacts the UMBC SGA’s values of inclusion and reflection. While there is a danger that, as with any ritual, familiarity and repetition could hollow out its meaning, Passing the Gavel has served as an important vehicle for transmitting ideals from person to person and across generations of leaders, both at UMBC and at other institutions where student governments employ the practice.

Passing the Gavel at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Photo Credit: David Hoffman

Every pedagogy enacts a philosophy about learning and learners. Passing the Gavel enacts a philosophy of knowledge as constructed by members of a community, and of learners in that community as active agents and co-creators. In contrast, when an educator reads prepared lecture notes to an auditorium full of silent students, or directs students through a heavily scripted activity, the pedagogy prizes expertise and authority, casts knowledge as information and teaching as content transmission, and regards students as objects: empty vessels to be filled, or clay to be sculpted. The philosophy behind a lecture from a prepared text or a heavily scripted activity favors certainty and quality control, and abhors spontaneity and the risk that information will be distorted or changed in transmission.

The practical challenge for civic educators is to strike an appropriate balance: neither waiting passively and wishfully for students to make the imaginative leaps that lead to spontaneous learning, nor so enclosing and dominating their experience that they internalize unintended lessons about their own powerlessness and isolation. The UMBC student government’s Passing the Gavel tradition would not have emerged more than a decade ago without some gentle coaching, over a period of years, by a staff advisor. But had the ritual been imposed as a civic duty or dictated as the one right way to conclude a public meeting, its meaning for students would have been distorted and diminished.

Probably none of us involved with civic learning and democratic engagement in higher education view ourselves as authoritarian content-disseminators or script managers. However, it is well worth asking whether our current practices are striking the right balances, and whether there is more room than we have sometimes recognized to model and enact the values that are central to our emergent, collective vision of a thriving democracy. Specifically, can we achieve our ambitious civic learning outcomes more effectively by planting more seeds and imposing less structure?

We can begin answering that broad question by interrogating our current practices and considering some new possibilities:

Sharing Responsibility and Control: Is there room within courses and programs to shift some responsibility and control from educators to students?

Enabling Spontaneity: To the extent that courses and programs involve scripted content-delivery, directed behaviors, or rote learning, is there room to afford students more flexibility and space for spontaneity?

Embracing Vulnerability: Can we approach courses, programs, and everyday campus interactions with more humility and a greater willingness to be vulnerable, so that students are more likely to experience faculty, staff, themselves, and each other as human beings who are fully present and engaged in collective work within a community of learners?

Fostering Relationships: Can we do more, both within and beyond courses and programs, to create opportunities for students to build authentic, mutual, and reciprocal relationships with each other, with faculty and staff members, and with community partners?

Building Collective Capacities: Can we do more to support students in activities that both enrich individual students and help them build collective civic capacity over time (as in the Passing the Gavel ritual), in forums that can evolve as their collective capacity grows?

Choosing Empowering Language: Both within our courses and programs and in our everyday relationships and communications, can we do more to choose inclusive and empowering language? Among other things, this would entail avoiding some very common uses of “institution voice,” as when “we” or “us” (meaning, the institution) shares information with “you” (students, who are symbolically reduced to customers, implicitly excluded from “we” and “us”).

Providing Support for Learning from Everyday Interactions: Can we do more to support students in learning from their unstructured experiences of navigating everyday politics, on campus and beyond, so that they become increasingly resilient and sophisticated? Can we do so without disrupting the organic character of those experiences or undermining students’ agency?

Transcending Categories and Boundaries: Can we ask ourselves all of the foregoing questions, not just about courses, programs, and other settings with obvious civic dimensions (service-learning, explorations of public policy or public opinion, deliberative dialogues, voter engagement programs) but about every learning context at our institutions: orientation sessions, student organization meetings, faculty office hours, commencement exercises? Can our entire institutions become teeming civic ecosystems in which students experience and develop the knowledge, skills, and dispositions useful to a thriving democracy in many settings?

As American Democracy Project founder George Mehaffy has observed about that initiative’s early work, too often higher education’s civic learning and democratic engagement efforts have been marginal, episodic, and celebratory: too shallow to fulfill our purposes. Taking a candid look at our current practices and considering new possibilities, using the questions listed above as a guide, is likely to reveal opportunities to make our civic learning and democratic engagement work more integral, relational, organic, and generative (Hoffman, 2015), and so congruent with our aspirations for a thriving democracy.

What pedagogies do you believe would support the vision and learning outcomes described in previous posts in this series? What questions do you think people in higher education should be asking about our current civic pedagogies?

David Hoffman is Assistant Director of Student Life for Civic Agency at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and an architect of UMBC’s BreakingGround initiative. His work is directed at fostering civic agency and democratic engagement through courses, co-curricular experiences and cultural practices on campus. His research explores students’ development as civic agents, highlighting the crucial role of experiences, environments, and relationships students perceive as “real” rather than synthetic or scripted. David is a member of Steering Committee for the American Democracy Project and the National Advisory Board for Imagining America. He is an alum of UCLA (BA), Harvard (JD, MPP) and UMBC (PhD).

Jennifer Domagal-Goldman is the national manager of AASCU’s American Democracy Project (ADP). She earned her doctorate in higher education from the Pennsylvania State University. She received her master’s degree in higher education and student affairs administration from the University of Vermont and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester. Jennifer’s dissertation focused on how faculty learn to incorporate civic learning and engagement in their undergraduate teaching within their academic discipline. Jennifer holds an ex-officio position on the eJournal of Public Affairs’ editorial board.

Stephanie King is the Assistant Director for Knowledge Communities and Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement (CLDE) Initiatives at NASPA where she directs the NASPA Lead Initiative. She has worked in higher education since 2009 in the areas of student activities, orientation, residence life, and civic learning and democratic engagement. Stephanie earned her Master of Arts in Psychology at Chatham University and her B.S. in Biology from Walsh University. She has served as the Coordinator for Commuter, Evening and Weekend Programs at Walsh University, Administrative Assistant to the VP and Dean of Students for the Office of Student Affairs, the Coordinator of Student Affairs, and the Assistant Director of Residence Life and Student Affairs at Chatham University.

Verdis L. Robinson is the National Director of The Democracy Commitment after serving as a tenured Assistant Professor of History and African-American Studies at Monroe Community College (NY). Professionally, Verdis is a fellow of the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Seminar on Citizenship and the American and Global Polity, and the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Faculty Seminar on Rethinking Black Freedom Studies: The Jim Crow North and West. Additionally, Verdis is the founder of the Rochester Neighborhood Oral History Project that with his service-learning students created a walking tour of the community most impacted by the 1964 Race Riots, which has engaged over 400 members of Rochester community in dialogue and learning. He holds a B.M. in Voice Performance from Boston University, a B.S. and an M.A. in History from SUNY College at Brockport, and an M.A. in African-American Studies from SUNY University at Buffalo.

AASCU and 10 of its member institutions partner to equip college students with the ability to navigate the online news environment

(WASHINGTON, D.C.)—Today, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ American Democracy Project (ADP) announced its new initiative, Digital Polarization: Promoting Online Civic Literacy. Preparing students with the skills to combat digital polarization and fake news is a complex problem. The initiative aims to equip college students with the skills they need for online civic reasoning, and to encourage them to make positive interventions in the online information environments they inhabit.

“What we’ve found is giving students a few simple techniques to verify and investigate the information that comes to them in their daily feeds can make a massive difference,” said Mike Caulfield, ADP’s civic fellow and director of Blended and Networked Learning at Washington State University Vancouver, who will lead the initiative. “The trick is giving students the right skills—skills for 2018, not 1998.” Caulfield has been recognized for his thinking on these issues, both at national conferences and through Hapgood, his long-running blog on educational technology.

Ten AASCU member institutions have been chosen to develop, pilot and assess an online civic literacy curricula on their campuses: Black Hills State University (S.D.); The City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY College of Staten Island (N.Y.); Georgia College (Ga.); Indiana University Kokomo; Metropolitan State University of Denver (Colo.); Millersville University of Pennsylvania; San Jose State University (Calif.); Texas A&M University-Central Texas; University of North Carolina at Charlotte; and Washington State University Vancouver.

In this initiative, students will track, catalog and analyze fake news, while learning deeper truths about polarization, the economics of the web and the psychology of conspiracy theory. The 2016 national election and the current political climate bring into sharp focus questions about facts, news and information. Online platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have a profound influence on our national discourse, national politics and election processes. Social media is challenging traditional news outlets, calling into question the credibility of traditional reporting and formerly trusted sources of information. Citizens need to find and make sense of the best information available if they are to make the best decisions possible.

Participating campuses will develop, adopt and assess an online civic literacy curricula focused specifically on vetting the information students encounter online. The initiative will incorporate digital polarization and/or civic online information literacy into new and/or existing courses across a variety of disciplines and in co-curricular activities. Such events and offerings might take the form of library orientation events, invited speakers, community panels, professional development trainings, and/or common readings.

“The need for digital fluency has never been more urgent, as our reliance on social media and the internet for news and information only continues to grow. We are confident that this work will help advance student online civic literacy and elevate best practices for teaching digital fluency, while improving our information environments,” said Amanda Antico, executive director of ADP. “The Digital Polarization initiative is a timely solution to a problem that is affecting America’s democratic and civic engagement.”

###

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is a Washington, D.C.-based higher education association of more than 400 public colleges, universities, and systems whose members share a learning- and teaching-centered culture, a historic commitment to underserved student populations, and a dedication to research and creativity that advances their regions’ economic progress and cultural development. These are institutions Delivering America’s Promise of Opportunities for All.

AASCU and 12 of its member institutions will partner with the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life to improve student political learning and participation in democracy.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.)—Today, the American Democracy Project (ADP), a program of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), announced a new two-year initiative, Assessing and Improving Political Learning and Engagement on Campus. Building on the long-standing programmatic commitment of ADP to preparing informed and politically engaged citizens for our democracy, this initiative aims to improve nonpartisan student political learning and participation.

ADP will partner with the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE) at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life on this research-to-practice initiative. Over the course of two years, 12 AASCU campuses will test tools with which to assess campus climates for political learning and engagement. Together, campus teams working with researchers from IDHE will pilot processes for engaging campus communities in measuring, understanding and improving campus climates in order to ensure that all students are prepared to be informed, engaged citizens.

Amanda Antico, executive director of AASCU’s American Democracy Project, notes, “Too few young Americans participate in even the most fundamental forms of civic engagement, such as voting. Unequal participation results in unequal representation. These conditions obstruct our ability as a nation to address and resolve complex social and political problems, which is why this initiative is important and necessary. ADP hopes to educate, inspire and prepare college students for a life of active civic engagement in order to cultivate a more vibrant democracy.”

Twelve AASCU member institutions have been chosen to participate in this initiative: Central State University (Ohio); Fayetteville State University (N.C.); Ferris State University (Mich.); Illinois State University (Ill.); Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (Ind.); James Madison University (Va.); Keene State College (N.H.); Sam Houston State University (Texas); San Francisco State University (Calif.); Stockton University (N.J.); University of Nebraska Omaha (Neb.); and Weber State University (Utah).

According to IDHE Director Nancy Thomas, “Colleges and universities play a critical role in ensuring the health and future of our democracy, and AASCU campuses are on the front line of that work. The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life is proud to be working with AASCU’s American Democracy Project. This critical partnership has implications not just for the participating campuses, but for all colleges and universities.”

Together, ADP, IDHE and the 12 participating campuses will develop a reliable and replicable approach to assessing and changing campus climates for political learning and engagement, as well as a set of interventions for other campuses to use. The campuses will serve as a set of model institutions from which others can learn about how to cultivate campus climates that best prepare students with the necessary knowledge, skills and commitment to political learning and participation.

###

The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) is a Washington, D.C.-based higher education association of more than 400 public colleges, universities, and systems whose members share a learning- and teaching-centered, a historic commitment to underserved student populations, and a dedication to research and creativity that advances their regions’ economic progress and cultural development. These are institutions Delivering America’s Promise of Opportunities for All.

The Institute for Democracy & Higher Education (IDHE), part of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, serves as a leading venue for research, resources, and advocacy on college student political learning and engagement in democracy. Through research, resource development, and convenings, the Institute strives to inform and shift college and university priorities, practices, and culture to strengthen democracy and advance social and political equity. The only university-wide college of its kind, the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life offers transformational student learning and service opportunities, conducts groundbreaking research on young people’s civic and political participation, and forges innovative community partnerships.

The American Democracy Project (ADP) is a multi-campus initiative focused on public higher education’s role in preparing the next generation of informed, engaged citizens for our democracy. The project began in 2003 as an initiative of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU), in partnership with The New York Times.

The goal of the American Democracy Project is to produce graduates who are committed to being knowledgeable, involved citizens in their communities. Since its inception, ADP has hosted 13 national and 18 regional meetings, a national assessment project, and hundreds of campus initiatives including voter education and registration, curriculum revision projects, campus audits, special days of action and reflection, speaker series and many recognition and award programs.